The Reverend Joe Miller
THE sound of church bells, so he assured us, enabled Mr. Froude on occasions partially to bridge the gap separating him from the Middle Ages ; in much the same way Dr. Hill's merry little carillon carries those who have ears to hear back to an age which today seems almost equally remote. Nothing, as hap frequently been pointed out, dates so much as humour, and nothing, there- fore, can well be more evocative. On opening the present volume the reader will at once find himself transported to that half- forgotten provincial world, peopled almost exclusively by absent- minded clergymen, impertinent choir-boys and deaf vergers, where every railway carriage contains a witty fellow-traveller and nervous householders have only to open the back-door to find themselves confronted with a worthless but humorous tramp. Those with a taste for clerical life and an enthusiasm for England's Glory matches will here find what I feel certain the author would describe, if his modesty permitted, as " a rich feast."
The volume is divided into four sections. The first, entitled " Our Divine Lord and Wit," it would be improper for a layman to criticise, but one may perhaps be allowed to suggest in passing that if, as the author suggests, St. Matthew xv 14 was intended as a joke, one is forced considerably to revise one's ideas on the Gospel spirit. The remaining chapters are devoted to " Clerics and Wit," " Laymen and Wit," and " Eire and Wit." The last is too specialised for my, taste, but will doubtless achieve its own particular public. The second, culled, as it largely is, from the pages of humorous journals of many lands, of which the author appears to have an exhaustive knowledge, licks not unnaturally the personal touch which elsewhere gives the book its peculiar and delightful character. (Incidentally, it conjures up a wonderful picture of a book-lined rectory-study, where Paley's Evidences rub shoulders with bound volumes of Answers and Tit-Bits, and old copies of The Christian Year lie cheek by jowl with back- numbers of Fliegende Bliitter.) But Clerics and Wit could hardly, one fancies, be better. Maybe a Church of England upbringing and a Norfolk background render me unduly partial, but the reader will here find embalmed an atmosphere not easily capturable between the pages of a book. Admittedly, the anecdotes themselves are not very like those in, say, the New Yorker, as the following example will show : " A well-known honorary canon, who had been playing cricket on the Saturday, at the end of the Second Lesson, said, 'Here endeth the second innings,' which revealed the lamentable fact that his mind was more inclined to cricket than reading the Second Lesson! " Nevertheless, they certainly bear out the author's claim that " a great deal of wit and humour enter into the clergy's lives, for which we thank God most warmly."
Only one minor criticism occurs to me ; it is surely rather strange not to find in a book of humorous anecdotes by a Norfolk parson a single example of the innumerable tales current about the present occupant of the See of Norwich?
OSBERT LANCASTER.
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